A boys’ room by the numbers …

PublishedOctober 6, 2015

Someone once told me that boys will always love their mothers, forever and for always. Boys may not break our hearts but they sure break our backs. Both my boys have shared a room for the better part of the last eighteen years and both recently left for university. Somehow instead of double the mess, the wreckage that is their bedroom was a disaster of epidemic proportions. There are school supplies in that room seeking political asylum. It took me until October to venture in there because when you order a Hazmat suit online, seems there is a fair amount of explaining to do to Public Safety Canada.

Once I decided that an intervention was essential (just in case we had house guests), I swooped in like a SWAT team … singular SWAT team, mind you. Their room was unrecognizable. Two full days later, I have to say I’m damn proud of myself … their room is now pretty tidy and no property restoration company was involved!

This exercise was not without casualties however. As I cleaned out their room, here is what I found:

18 hockey player figurines

17 plastic mini sticks

16 minature dinosaurs

15 dirty socks (not matched of course)

14 hockey tournament medals

13 hockey pucks

12 Disney pins (still attached to their Disney lanyard)

11 USB sticks (contents unknown)

10 NFL game jerseys

9 bags of paintball balls

8 bobbleheads

7 calculators

6 empty tins of chewing tobacco

5 different school permission forms signed by me

4 letters I’d written to them at camp – unopened

3 fifths of vodka – empty of course

2 poker sets, and

1 clearly used beer funnel

Oh, and I also found roughly ten dollars in coins which I feel I am certainly keeping (I feel I am owed).

So after several bags of garbage and recyclables if I have any advice to give young mothers of boys it is this: don’t wait until they leave for university to clean out their room. And the second piece of advice is: if you think they’ve been doing it themselves all this time, you are as pathetically naïve as I was.

Now as I gaze into a clean and tidy boys room I realize it’s as unrecognizable now as it was when it was a lethal death zone.

Everyone also says boys are easier and I suppose they are … better with personal protective equipment.